[Verge] From God Game to the Street
So, I mentioned that Verge has this major problem concerning being too much like a god game, viewed from heaven looking down at people and corporations and nanotech laserbots and religions and other ideas. The players have this tendency to push them around like pawns. In a way, that's cool, because it gets people to treat major religions with the same reverence as, say, Pizza Hut, and that amuses the fuck out of me. But it's not cool because nothing pulls the players down to the street level to their characters.
I have an idea. It's not going to solve everything. It's just this cute little technique I want to try out to help. I still need a major reward mechanic to make the players scream and shout and know what they want their characters to do. Here's my idea.
Every scene has to be initially framed as if it's being watched through a closed-circuit tv camera, in the third person.
I think that will help people get to the color. Without the color, Verge will become a game about moving words and lines around on a piece of paper. With the color, Verge can be awesome. Making players frame things as a creepy observer sets an Orwellian tone, first of all. Second, it makes them think of the stuff around the characters: the cement and the steel and the cars and the leaflets and futuristic phone booths.
Maybe I'll even put out a rule that says that a player has to narrate one bit of color for each die he brings out. If a scene starts with 10 dice, that's 10 bits of color. Gotta playtest that to make sure it doesn't mess with pace. I imagine grabbing a pile of dice and checking my sheet, seeing I have 10 dice to bring out. I count out 10 quickly (had to do it anyway), then start narrating. Every time I hit upon some cool setting meme, whether it's in the network map or not, I push one of the dice forward as a little signal.
I have an idea. It's not going to solve everything. It's just this cute little technique I want to try out to help. I still need a major reward mechanic to make the players scream and shout and know what they want their characters to do. Here's my idea.
Every scene has to be initially framed as if it's being watched through a closed-circuit tv camera, in the third person.
I think that will help people get to the color. Without the color, Verge will become a game about moving words and lines around on a piece of paper. With the color, Verge can be awesome. Making players frame things as a creepy observer sets an Orwellian tone, first of all. Second, it makes them think of the stuff around the characters: the cement and the steel and the cars and the leaflets and futuristic phone booths.
Maybe I'll even put out a rule that says that a player has to narrate one bit of color for each die he brings out. If a scene starts with 10 dice, that's 10 bits of color. Gotta playtest that to make sure it doesn't mess with pace. I imagine grabbing a pile of dice and checking my sheet, seeing I have 10 dice to bring out. I count out 10 quickly (had to do it anyway), then start narrating. Every time I hit upon some cool setting meme, whether it's in the network map or not, I push one of the dice forward as a little signal.